That is, how lucky those of us who lived through, say, 1960 to now, are compared to just about any people born before or since.
We saw Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, including all the first satellites to visit the moon, every planet and everything else we've visited in the solar system. We watched the Voyagers cruise the solar system and into interstellar space. We saw the first probes to EVERY planet, from Mercury to Pluto. Recently, while working on the anniversary post of Voyager 2's first fly by of Jupiter, it really sunk in that we still haven't flown any probe past Uranus and Neptune except Voyager 2. I remember comparing the early satellite pictures of Jupiter to the photos from the world's best observatories and seeing how much better the pictures from the probes were, and somewhere in the years realizing that if I compared the best photos of "the Ice Giants" that existed before Voyager's photos to them, it would be even more extreme.
Part of what started this line of thought was a catchy headline about the first satellite to Pluto, New Horizons, at Ars Technica. "We saw the heart of Pluto 10 years ago—it’ll be a long wait to see the rest" In case it's not obvious, the reference to "the heart of Pluto" is a pun based on the light colored feature obvious on the bottom right in this very commonly used photo from New Horizons. Some folks might have to squint a bit to really see the heart-shape.
Four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the spacecraft's Ralph instrument to create this enhanced color global view of Pluto. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University/SWRI (wait... LORRI and Ralph?)
As I know I've mentioned before, I watched New Horizons launch into its journey on January 19, 2006, pulling off the road during a bike ride down to what we call the south beaches. The Pluto flyby was on July 15, 2015, ten years ago today, and I wrote a short overview two days later talking about visiting Pluto as symbolically childhood's end. In other words, it took New Horizons over nine years to get to Pluto. It took several years to design the spacecraft and the mission. Ars Technica points out that a 50-year wait for a second mission wouldn't be surprising. Just ask Uranus and Neptune which haven't been revisited since Voyager 2's flybys in January '86 (Uranus) and August of '89. If Pluto proved to be made of gold, diamonds, or something else that could bring wealth, there might be more interest in going back, but ten years after the flyby of Pluto there are no missions planned or even starting to be planned to go back to Pluto and no real prospects for one. Without some serious improvements to some aspects of spaceflight, it still takes unreasonably long to get there and going faster just reduces the amount of information that can be gathered in a flyby and sent back. Flying there and staying there in orbit allows much more investigation.
As approach the middle of July and the anniversary of Apollo 11, I generally just rerun my usual "Peak of Western Civilization Day" graphic, but I started looking for something better or just different. Zendo Deb has some neat videos of Apollo 11's launch on July 16.
I suspect a lot of us who have been among the lucky to watch all these missions and programs unfold before us are all about sick of the "OK Boomer" stuff. Complaints about things you might have fought your entire life to stop but couldn't. Like that, none of us ever choose our birthdays, but many of us just happened to have been lucky enough to remember the first Mercury mission all the way to the last Space Shuttle, the landers, then rovers on Mars, Voyagers, Hubble Space Telescope and today's launches almost getting so routine that few people even watch.
The Shuttle sucked up most of NASA's budgets while it was active. SLS is now sucking up most of NASA's budgets and it isn't active.
ReplyDeleteGet rid of SLS, make NASA a consumer of commercial space vehicles only and turn the savings into probes.
Of course, part of the issue with the previous generations of probes is trying to fit the maximum number of projects, sensors, probes, camera, doo-hickies and thingamajigs into the maximum size available for the launchers (Atlas and Delta) and with a service module/booster strong enough to get said probe to the target area before a century or two.
Not discounting the Voyagers or New Horizons, but what if... the Voyagers were scaled up and built to be launched off of a Saturn 1B or other Saturn Variant? What if New Horizons was scaled up and built to be launched by an HLV of the shuttle tank/boosters?
Those would be some big-arsed probes. Lots of room for better sensors, computers, antennae, solar panels and RTGs. And the boosters for said probes could be, well, correspondingly huge, so faster means shorter travel times, or carrying enough fuel to do multiple trajectory burns and such.
Right now the only vehicles available for launch service are either not ready (New Glenn and Vulcan) or a SpaceX Falcon9 version (Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy.) For some reason NASA or other agencies really haven't jumped on the F9 or FH bandwagon for launching probes. Of course NASA thinks, from what I get, that everything revolves around SLS.
The big gamechanger, of course, will be once SpaceX gets Starship actually flying regularly and not just for HLS or launching Starlink satellites.
As a yout I would wonder and be amazed by what the oldsters had seen in their lifetimes. I met my friend's grandmother in the 1970s.
ReplyDeleteAs a young girl she had traveled from Lincoln, NE to Lincoln, CA on a covered wagon. In her life, the automobile and the airplane and the internal combustion engine were invented. Telephones became common. Two world wars, the atom bomb, the breaking of the sound barrier, men on the moon. Penicillin, the first heart transplant, the first MRI machines, the transistor, and so much more. All in one life time.
In my life I worked for a brief time to make silicon wafers the size of hockey pucks to be sliced into circuit boards. Room-sized computers with not much more computational power than today's smart phone. Privately owned jet aircraft capable of 40,000 feet. Now, privately held space corps launching for fun and profit. Gnat-sized drones, high resolution optics affordable to the common man, and much more.
It truly has been an exciting time to live.
I've often thought about that generation as lucky, having been born at the time of the Wright brothers and then getting to see Apollo 11. Of course it's all a decision that can't be put up to a vote.
DeleteThe first computer I worked on had switches on the front panel to enter machine language, which we used to enter code to use a paper tape reader. That was '78-ish.
Phone? I think my Commodore 64 outperformed it. Or my mid '80s XT PC.
Yes to all you said.
ReplyDeleteWatched all the launches & built all the models (Thank you Revell!).
And then as an adult had the fortune of marrying someone whose father was a physicist that happed to work at NASA/MSFC (!). That gentleman was around when they stood-up NASA and had all sorts of stories. Before 9/11, when we'd go on the MSFC bus tours, the tour guides would just give up, my FIL's stories were much better than the canned info they gave out.
I've enjoyed being around during civilization's first (and hopefully not last) round of 'getting off the rock'. And for my career, I've enjoyed going from SS/SD to 256gB usb.. :)
A guy I worked with in the early '80s and somehow lost touch with worked on Cape Canaveral in the early '60s. His favorite story was being on base when JFK came. He was walking out of a building's restroom and guy he had never seen came out of nowhere and pushed him back into the bathroom. He didn't know if he was going to be robbed or raped, but when he started to resist the guy told him he was Secret Service and President Kennedy was outside the door. Nobody who wasn't cleared was allowed out there.
DeleteIt's been a fantastic time to be alive. My biggest regret is that so few people see the value of space.
ReplyDeleteI had the famous "Earthrise" poster on my wall, back in high school.
ReplyDeleteAn astounding something that no one I've ever seen before then, and looking back I don't think anyone even expected to see it, though it was obviously predictable.
I suppose the amazement might return, though SciFi FX are so incredible now that maybe any future image will be "meh" to later generations?